Ben Ragsdale (from left) and seminary student “Greg” Gregory met with Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young at Richmond’s Byrd Airport in 1967 while participating in the anti-war effort Vietnam Summer. (Photo courtesy Ben Ragsdale)
When Ben Ragsdale met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Sept. 26, 1963, he was a sophomore at the all-white, all-male Randolph-Macon College attending the seventh annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Virginia Union University.
As King left the stage, Ragsdale approached. “I told him who I was … and why I wanted to be involved.” King listened with interest, then asked Ragsdale a question: “Ben, sometime when I’m in town, do you think I’d be able to come out to Randolph-Macon College and speak to the student body?”
Chagrined, Ragsdale says, “I had to tell him, ‘Dr. King, I don’t think that will work at this time.’ ” He explained that he and other students were calling for the school’s integration, but things were at a stalemate. After the conference, Ragsdale resolved to join in the SCLC’s work: “Within two weeks, I connected with Virginia Union students and we were working on voter registration in Gilpin Court.”
Ragsdale spoke in March during one of a series of roundtable events held by the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission, which is documenting King’s visits to Virginia for a digital archive and reflecting on his legacy 50 years after his April 4, 1968, assassination.
At the same event, Corey Walker, vice president at VUU, highlighted King's connections to the university, particularly his relationship with Samuel DeWitt Proctor, who served as dean of the graduate school of religion, then vice president and president. The two met when King was a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Proctor gave a lecture there.
In 1955, King invited Proctor to speak at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on “the relevance of the New Testament to the contemporary situation." Walker said the theme would resonate in King's public theology and political activism as the civil rights leader sought "to challenge his congregation at Dexter to understand the relevance of religion as a force for change and transformation in American life."
Proctor accepted another invitation to speak at King's church in 1956 as VUU's president. After learning of the Jan. 30, 1956, bombing of King's home, Proctor wrote to his friend, “I telephoned your home shortly after the news report. I was sorry to hear what happened, but I am glad that there is a person of your caliber in town who cannot be intimated and whose character is so unassailable that they have to attack your porch.”
Proctor’s words, Walker said, "underscore the exemplary nature of why we’re drawn back to King — not King as singular individual responsible for the entirety of the black freedom struggle, but King as a representative of the quality of character we admire and those exemplars who push us beyond thinking of our existing reality to live into new possibilities of human being and belonging in the world."
Ragsdale told the group that although he'd grown up in the small, conservative Southside Virginia town of Waverly, by the time he arrived at Randolph-Macon, "I had pretty much shed my Confederate past and was ready to support the civil rights movement." The bravery of Freedom Riders and students — including those from Virginia Union — who sat in at lunch counters to protest segregation made an impression on him. He'd seen King and his allies confront racism in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 and lead the March on Washington that August. He was horrified by the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers that June and by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls just 11 days before King's VUU appearance.
King, he said, made Americans aware of the ugliness of racism, shifting public opinion in favor of civil rights.
"The country was turned around, not just by Dr. King, but he was the face of a movement of conscience seeking a beloved community," he said. "I was just proud to be a tiny part of it."
To find out more about the commission, visit mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov.
